1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to development of electronic forms and processing of data collected using the electronic forms.
2. Background of the Invention
Non-technical personnel within an organization frequently have need to create forms that are accessible to others, within or external to the organization, over a network, such as a corporate intranet or the Internet. Typically, such non-technical personnel do not possess the skills that would allow them to create the forms themselves. Instead, such personnel are required to develop business specifications for the forms and provide the specifications to a developer, who then creates the electronic form (in HTML or other appropriate language). In addition, once the electronic form is created and made available to form users, data collected using the form must be made available for input into various back-end applications for processing. Again, developers are required to build interfaces for inputting data collected using the forms into the back-end systems. Use of developers for these purposes is costly and inefficient, particularly in a large organization. Thus, there exists a need for a self-service system that can be used by non-technical personnel to create electronic forms and automatically feed the data generated through completion of those forms into various applications for processing.